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  • Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media
  • Barak Kushner
Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media. By David C. Earhart. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008. xv + 529 pages. Hardcover $74.95.

In Certain Victory David Earhart has put together a luxurious visual feast. This thick and weighty tome is sure to become a keepsake for most scholars of wartime Japan and those interested in social mobilization campaigns and the history of war and image. It is not, however, a particularly reader-friendly book: the almost-encyclopedic coverage of photographs, paintings, and captions renders the more than four hundred pages of research simultaneously awesome and numbing. The author has definitely mastered the art of collecting, cataloguing, and arranging visual images to tell the story [End Page 210] of how the war appeared to the wartime Japanese, and the book, with its excellently reproduced photos and artwork, is one of only a few full visual chronicles in English of how the Japanese witnessed the war. Ultimately, however, Certain Victory stops short of trying to advance our understanding of the relationship between the production and reception of visual media. Earhart states that his book is not a history of wartime media; it is not, in fact, a history at all: "it is intended to convey the wartime media's presentation of contemporary events, rather than to provide a comprehensive account or assessment of those events" (p. xiii). Is this a cop-out, a sort of "just-enjoy the images" routine? To be fair, Earhart is not looking for easy answers, but his title is telling: his focus is above all the images through which the media sought to display both the successes and hardships the nation would have to endure to attain what it promised its imperial subjects—"certain victory."

To reconstruct these images, Earhart focuses primarily on the Cabinet Information Bureau's (CIB) official magazine, Photographic Weekly Report. The goal of this and other news and photojournal magazines was to get Japanese to support the war effort. He points out that newspaper companies, like the Asahi, sent reporters to the front, who then shipped live reportage photos back to Japan. Such media companies printed gōgai, or special editions, as frequently as they would sell. The author touches on which pictures they published, and why, but he does not find this to be a fundamental issue: his position, it seems, is that internal discussions of why one photo was chosen and another deleted are not directly relevant to a presentation of the images seen by the general public. Similarly, the book cites very few secondary sources—to both its credit and detriment; the focus is on the primary media sources. The eight-volume series on the war put out by Iwanami from 2005, Iwanami kōza: Ajia Taiheiyō sensō, and related series get no mention, and of authors who have written on the media and the war effort, Earhart utilizes Nanba Kōji intensely, but gives Ichinose Toshiya a miss. One glaring lacuna concerns the representation of how Japan saw China, or the colonies of Taiwan and Korea. Earhart's book, like many that cover Imperial Japan, pays short shrift to the idea of empire, even though he dissects the image of empire. With hindsight, we know the empire is there but also that it will disappear; what was the perspective of the Japanese at the time?

The details that Earhart provides are nonetheless enlightening. In his discussion of the February 1932 Shanghai incident, he highlights the ramifications of the first installment of stories about the "Three Human Bullets." The press lionized these soldiers, who sacrificed themselves in forcing an opening in a barbed wire fortification; photographs of families receiving their ashes in white boxes were reproduced widely. Consumer products also had a tie-in, from the "Three Human Bullets Meal" at the Takashimaya department store in Osaka to the "Three Human Bullets" rice crackers sold elsewhere. In 1938 the "government took concrete steps to mold the media image of the war effort" (p. 89), and a new form of photographic weekly employed "bold lighting and extreme angles dramatizing the subject...

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